SOURCE: "Lenin and Gorky: The Turning Point," in The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, second edition, Stanford University Press, 1975, pp. 156-76.

In the following essay, Mathewson argues that Lenin's article Party Organization and Party Literature and Maxim Gorky's novel Mother together ushered in a new era in Russian thinking that revolved around Soviet literary ideals.

No fewer than six attitudes toward literature, some of them contradictory, have been discerned in Lenin's writings. Soviet critics have had to make the most of these disparate views, stressing one at the expense of the others, but never moving beyond them. Although, taken together, they indicate that Lenin sensed the fundamental antitheses between the Russian classical writers and the radical critics, his most consistent emphasis was functional, and his contribution to the utilitarian tradition is his declaration of the principle of outright political partisanship in literature. The most severely functionalist document in...